I'm starting to finally appreciate the mystique of the Sundance Film Festival, several months after finally popping my Park City cherry. So many of the movies screened at the festival are opening to wide acclaim. At the time, reading through the synopses in the program, it was difficult to ascertain the quality of the movies. Surely not all of the movies could live up to the surely biased write-ups by Sundance programmers?Maybe they can. If critics are to be believed, the programmers chose a great lineup, and I hope to return again next year and catch more movies.Some of the Sundance babies making waves:

The Return - Rave reviews; I'm going to see it this week. I missed a screening but Dave took my pass off my hands and gave it a thumbs up.

Super Size Me - winner of the Sundance Documentary award, this movie was shot by a guy who ate nothing but fast food from McDonalds for a month. Predictably, he gains a lot of weight and comments on the obesity epidemic in America. I'm interested in seeing it for the comedy. As a social gadfly, it's lacking. After all, what's surprising about the fact that he gained weight eating nothing but Big Macs? If there are Americans who still believe that fast food is healthy, they sure don't earn my sympathy.

The Corporation - the other Sundance doc that buzzed. Based on the book The Corporation : The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, this documentary examines that strange entity we know as the corporation as a person, putting it through diagnostic tests used to assess human personalities. Not surprisingly, corporations are found "self-interested, amoral, callous and deceitful." Having worked at a corporation for nearly seven years, the results don't surprise me, but I do think this realization has profound implications for our analysis of topics like offshoring. Our laws treat corporations as humans, and in doing so we may have granted them too much power, perhaps pointing to a future long predicted by science fiction writers like Gibson and depicted in anime movies set in the future, when corporations and not governments run the world. But that's a topic for another day.